While presidents frequently create new policies through unilateral power, empirical scholarship generally focuses on executive orders and overlooks other categories of directives. We introduce data on more than 50,000 unilateral directives issued between 1877 and 2020 and use machine learning techniques to characterize their substantive importance and issue areas. Our measures reveal significant increases in unilateral activity over time, driven largely by increases in foreign affairs and through the substitution of memoranda for executive orders. We use our measures to formally evaluate the historical development of the unilateral presidency and reassess theoretical claims about public opinion and unilateral power. Our research provides new evidence about variation in the use of presidential authority and opens new avenues for empirical inquiry.

Unilateral presidential action is thought to be limited by the ability of successors to easily reverse past decisions. Yet, most executive actions are never formally revoked. We argue that because of presidents’ unique position as chief executive, some actions create outcomes that make policy reversal more difficult or even infeasible. We develop a novel measure of policies with more immutable consequences and analyze the revocation of executive orders issued between 1937 and 2021. We find the degree of outcome immutability reduces the influence of political conditions on policy revocation. We further examine these dynamics in three cases in which presidents have substantial discretion – diplomacy, non-combatant detention, and police militarization. Scholarship has long highlighted the president’s first-mover status relative to other institutional actors as a key source of their power. Collectively, our argument and evidence demonstrate this applies to their relationship with successors.

This article has three sections, each of which deals with an Executive Order. The first section, “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Past,” emphasizes the critical role that Executive Orders played in the formation of OIRA. More specifically, OIRA owes its initial existence to the establishment of a centralized regulatory review system, the Quality of Life Review, which initiated Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review of environmental regulations through the issuance of a directive from OMB. Every subsequent President expanded OMBs powers through the issuance of Executive Orders which culminated in the Iconic Executive Order 12291. The section concludes with the recommendation that a select class of Executive Orders, and OMB Directives, be designated as “Iconic” by the National Archivist in consultation with the OIRA, and then given substantial deference by incoming Administrations. The second section, “OIRA Present,” describes an Executive Order issued during the Kennedy Administration which remains in effect but was promulgated prior to the establishment of OIRA and therefore recommends that a new Executive Order be issued which gives OIRA specific authority to participate in the conduct of interagency reviews of Executive Orders. The third section, “OIRA Future,” describes an Executive Order which implements a regulatory budget (RB) and institutionalizes a mechanism for controlling the size of the administrative state. This final section of the article recommends that the aforementioned Executive Order be reviewed and modified based upon the outcome of a request for public comments, and rules with demonstrated positive net benefits should no longer be accorded an automatic entitlement for issuance as a final rule absent their inclusion in an RB.

The executive order process can be a long and complicated one, as directives may wind their way through various agencies before finding their way onto the president’s desk. Even after these orders have been issued, federal agencies will have a wide degree of latitude under certain conditions as it pertains to implementing them. In this article, I study the history of three separate presidential directives, two dealing specifically with environmental issues and one with general regulatory issues, in order to provide a picture of the process from inception to implementation. I consider three cases and explore the factors that drive presidents in choosing when or whether to issue an order and those that drive federal agencies to react as they do. This article encourages scholars to reconsider what they consider “unilateral,” pointing to the instances in which presidents must engage in bargaining within the executive branch they ostensibly head.

I examine gubernatorial use of executive orders, and assess how executive action influences statute adoption. I argue that strong governors use executive orders to pursue policy objectives when they perceive legislation as unlikely to pass. Multilevel Event History Analysis of executive orders and the adoption of statutes that protect the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community from 1975 to 2013 reveals that partisan control of government and intrastate factors influence both forms of policy adoption. My findings support the strategic model that argues that executives turn to executive orders when confronting unfavourable legislative conditions, and that governors issue protections more when entering office. Legislatures respond to partisan control of the legislature and social characteristics. Further, states that have pro-LGBT executive orders in place are more likely to adopt similar statutes. My results suggest that stronger governors are more likely to issue executive orders, but it is states with weaker governors that are more likely to adopt legislation.